Tommy and Grizel

London: Cassell and Company Limited, 1900. FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. viii, [432], 8 catalogue. Black cloth, bevelled edges, spine lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt. Patterned endpapers. Spine gently sunned, rubbed, faint marks and nicking to upper board, especially at leading edges, some foxing to edges and, on occasion, into margins. Annie Pearson's ex libris to front pastedown, featuring her Aberdeenshire house, Dunecht. A good+ copy of the second book in Barrie's Tommy series, with an interesting suffrage provenance.

Bradford-born Annie Pearson (1860-1932, née Cass, GBE), from 1917, Viscountess Cowdray, was a suffragist and philanthropist, dubbed the Fairy Godmother of Nursing for her financial support of the Royal College of Nursing and promotion of district nursing. She served in various roles across the Women's Liberal Federation, the Scottish Women's Hospitals and the Liberal Women's Suffrage Union, and was a prominent early member of the Women's Engineering Society (WES). Pearson hosted Mrs Pankhurst at Dunecht in September 1911, as she toured Scotland seeking support for the Conciliation Bill: "the highlight of the tour [was] Lady Cowdray's 'At Home' at Dunecht House, for which over a thousand invitations had been sent." (Leheman, 1991)
Pearson's bookplate is signed "Inv. W.P.B. 1907": 1907 is the year that the Pearsons leased Dunecht House, Aberdeenshire, buying it five years later. "W.P.B." was W.[illiam] Phillips Barrett (1861-1936), the New Zealand-born Manager of J. & E. Bumpus of Oxford Street, London, Booksellers to Queen Victoria. Barrett's initials were included on c. 600 bookplates of the era, when, in fact, the majority of them were designed by (at least) five fine engravers: John Augustus Charles Harrison (1872-1954), Robert Osmond (1874-1959), Charles Brooke Bird (1856-1916), John Edward Syson (1856-1929?) and George Ernest Vize (1865-1943?). Barrett's skill, then, was entrepreneurial: spotting a gap in the ex libris market, he persuaded clients to order a bookplate to be engraved and printed by Bumpus.

See also our signed copy of Sarah Grand's Adnam's Orchard, which features a plain Dunecht ex libris [ref.2176].
Leah Leneman (1991) A Guid Cause: The Women's Suffrage Movement in the North of Scotland. Edinburgh: EUP. Anon, 'Bookplates with the initials W. P. B.' Blog Post.